For Whom the Bell Tolls: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Alone with Maria, Robert Jordan feels the heather brushing against his legs and the weight of his pistol in its holster against his thighs. He feels Maria’s hand, firm and strong, locked in his, and his body is filled up with the “aching hollowness of wanting.” He kisses her and feels her breasts. All his life he would remember “the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots,” and the feeling of their love-making is a “dark passage which led to nowhere.” Time stops, and suddenly, he feels the earth move “out and away from under them.” He lies in the heather and looks at Maria lying opposite him, and he tells her that he loves her. She says that she felt the earth move, and he says that he felt it, too.

Robert Jordan admits that he has loved others, but not in the same way that he loves Maria. She says that if she is to be his woman, she wants to please him “in all ways,” and she tells him that her hair is growing—that it will soon be long and she will no longer “look ugly.” Jordan says that her body is the “loveliest in the world,” and that in a “fine body” such as hers, there is magic. He says that he has never felt the earth move before with any other woman.

Though Jordan is beside Maria, his mind is “thinking of the problem of the bridge,” and he starts to think about the positioning of the explosives, though he tells himself to stop worrying about the things he has to do. He should not worry about Pilar and Maria, since he needs to think about himself and his responsibilities in action. Jordan thinks about the possibility of the Republic losing: it would be impossible for those who believed in the Republic to live in fascist Spain. Jordan feels that he has no politics anymore, and that he must go back and earn a living teaching Spanish after the war.

Jordan thinks that Pablo has moved from the left to the right politically, and he reflects that the Republicans’ leaders are now the “enemies of the people.” Yet he also feels that he has become as “bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hard-shelled Baptist,” his mind employing clichés about politics (like “enemies of the people”) “without criticism.” Jordan reflects on Maria, who is “very hard on his bigotry”: she has not yet “affected his resolution” to keep fighting, “but he would much prefer not to die.” Jordan does not want to be a martyr, and he would like to spend a “long, long time” with Maria. He wonders how they will like Maria in Missoula, Montana, where he thinks he might be able to get a job, though he believes that he may be blacklisted there (for being a Communist).

Jordan thinks that all the life he has or will ever have is “today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again,” and that he must be grateful for what time he has. He isn’t sure whether Maria has been good or bad for him, but he thinks that it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years. He does not feel that he is a “romantic glorifier of the Spanish women,” since he has never felt very strongly about any of the Spanish women he has slept with, but he loves Maria deeply.

Jordan starts to feel resentful about the guerillas and the Republican cause; they are putting on a “lousy show,” and they will have to blow up the bridge under “impossible conditions” “to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started.” He thinks that Pilar pushed Maria into his sleeping bag, though after some consideration, he realizes that he is lying to himself about Pilar. His love for Maria is real, and it hasn’t been pushed on him. Maria has “made things easier,” since “she is a damned sight more civilized” than Jordan himself.

Jordan realizes that he and Maria will not have a lifetime together, “not time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house,” and that he must “make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration.” He wonders if Golz knew something about the struggle to love during war, and he continues to tell himself that he must live for the “now”—he must “concentrate all of that which you should have always into the short time that you can have it.”

Robert Jordan tells Maria that he loves her, and he asks her what she was talking about while he was thinking. She says that when they are together, he will not have to worry about his work, since she will not bother him or interfere. She wants to do things for him—wash his clothes, clean his pistol. She says that if he teaches her how to shoot it, either one of them could shoot the other and himself, or herself, if they needed to avoid capture. Maria shows him a razor blade that Pilar taught her how to use, and she makes Robert Jordan promise to shoot her if there is ever any need.

Maria also promises to roll cigarettes for Robert Jordan, dress his wounds, bring him coffee in the morning, or cut his hair, though he says that he doesn’t like to have his hair cut. She also offers to help with his work, though he says that he must do it alone. Nearing the camp, they see Pilar, who has been sleeping. She asks Maria to tell her “one thing of [her] own volition,” and though Maria hesitates, she eventually tells Pilar that the earth moved when she and Robert Jordan had sex. Pilar says that the earth “never moves more than three times in a lifetime”: for her, there have been two times, and there will never be a third.

Jordan reflects that when he is done with the war, he might want to take up “the study of women,” considering Pilar’s “gypsy thing”—her superstition and her ability to read the future. Robert Jordan tells Pilar that he does not believe in mysteries, and that they have enough work and “things to do” without mysteries. Pilar asks Jordan if the earth moved for him, too, and he begrudgingly admits that it did. She tells him that it is going to snow, even though it is almost June; Jordan looks up at the gray sky and admits that she may be right.